Between finding stardom in 1978 with Mork & Mindy on television and the big screen box-office success of Good Morning, Vietnam in 1987, Robin Williams made an ungainly collection of movies with one notable exception. Moscow on the Hudson (1984), the story of a Communist-era Russian circus musician who defects while on tour in New York City, is a bittersweet comedy from the also recently departed Paul Mazursky, and it allowed Williams – the perpetually "on" comedian – to explore the idea of an artist cut off from everything: his homeland, his family, and ultimately his art. It’s the gentlest of Cold War films, with Williams’ Vladimir Ivanoff queueing for hours in Moscow and later being mugged in Manhattan. Life is difficult wherever you live, and Williams displays unexpected qualities in his fine performance, whether it’s a timid hopefulness as a Soviet citizen or a soulful longing for happiness that grows bitter as an American immigrant. Thirty years on, it remains one of Williams’ best, and most underappreciated, screen roles. Craig Mathieson

Robin Williams in Moscow on the Hudson.

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One-Hour Photo

At a certain point in his career, Robin Williams began to play against type – or, more precisely, to work with restraint rather than excess, and to unsettle us by intimation. He did it in Christopher Nolan’s 2002 Insomnia, in which he played a manipulative, ingratiating figure who involved himself in a murder investigation being conducted by a weary Al Pacino. In the same year, in Mark Romanek’s One Hour Photo, he was a figure caught somewhere between sad and sinister, a solitary man whose life is lived vicariously. Plump, pale and colourless, with an over-exposed look, he is Sy the Photo Guy, who lives alone, works in a shopping mall photo lab and constructs a notion of family from the rolls of film he is given to process. He is obsessed with one particular family, the Yorkins, whose pictures he has been developing and collecting for 10 years. He has a floor-to-ceiling wall of images of them in his otherwise spartan apartment. When his ideal family proves to be less than perfect, he goes on a quest for retribution, but not in the way we might expect. It’s a performance that demands ambiguity and control, to match the stylised construction of the film, and that’s exactly what Williams delivered. Philippa Hawker

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen

The very quality that made Robin Williams a star – his talent as a verbal improviser – often cut him off from other performers: the wilder his free associations, the more he seemed trapped inside his own skull. One of the directors who understood this best was Terry Gilliam, whose 1988 fantasy The Adventures of Baron Munchausen brilliantly cast an uncredited Williams as the King of the Moon: literally an enormous head mounted on a silver platter, grey hair coiled on his scalp like ribbons of pasta, floating through space and babbling about being “at one with the cosmos”. Believing himself ruler of the whole of reality, the King is in fact the ultimate solipsist, in other words a lunatic; his self-regarding monologue – delivered in a high, slippery cod-Italian accent, a typical Williams “comic” voice – is broken up with strange chuckles, yelps and humming noises that seem transmitted through the ether, accompanied by winces of pain that belie his claims to have left the physical world behind. When head and body are finally reunited, the colour flows back into Williams' cheeks and he switches to another voice again, the triumphant roar of a vulgar Mafia don: “I'm back!” Jake Wilson

Mrs Doubtfire

I couldn’t take Robin Williams as a dramatic actor. For me, it was his sense of ridiculous that made him a star. My favourite was Mrs Doubtfire. As a drag act, it was thoroughly outclassed by Dustin Hoffman’s Tootsie, but drag wasn’t really the point of this performance. It was all about watching Williams grapple with his latex disguise. I also loved his voice work on Aladdin and Happy Feet. Animation was his metier, the only form of cinema that could really keep up with him. His genie and his Argentinian penguin were gems. Sandra Hall

Good Morning Vietnam

The role that I suspect was closest to his real personality was as Adrian Cronauer, in Good Morning, Vietnam. It captured all that manic energy and vocal creativity with a touch of the sentimentalism that was a frequent feature of his work. In the more serious roles, there were many moments of greatness, especially as the grumpy professor in Good Will Hunting and the suffering writer in The World According to Garp. Uncontrolled and on his feet, there was no-one funnier as a stand-up comedian, as some of his concert films showed. Reined back and brooding in the serious roles, there was an uncomfortable truthfulness, where the demons came closer to the surface. You could see there was a lot of pain there. There alamost always is with great comedians. Paul Byrnes